When legendary director Alfred Hitchcock wanted to build suspense and throw off moviegoers he would distract them with what he called a MacGuffin, which Webster’s defines as “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance.”
Arguably, some of the wayward college presidents fired by boards of directors in recent years fit this description. For example, the former president of American University, Benjamin Ladner, racked up about half a million dollars a year in expenses that included a personal chef and training trips to London, Paris and Rome, Paul Fain of the Chronicle of Higher Education recently reminded an audience at the American Enterprise Institute.
Yet the board at AU moved with dispatch to rid the university of Ladner. Meanwhile, as we have reported, AU has played host to annual conferences showcasing eco-terrorist techniques whether Ladner was there or not.
“What is driving these stories is tuition hikes and parent/student reaction to them,” Fain says of the “CEOs behaving badly” tales and the media play that they get. “Also, universities are cash strapped and whistleblowers blow the whistle on these presidents.”
(It should be noted that Fain cultivates inside sources who, as recipients and appendages, have a different view of the billions taxpayers and their elected representatives send to their institutions than that of those paying the freight.)
But who blows the whistle on faculty behaving badly other than groups such as ours? Boards of Trustees are not likely to, especially if faculty members are sitting on them.
The Board at Dartmouth, for example, consists of eight appointed members and eight elected trustees. Their deliberations are recorded but sealed for half a century.
“We can review tenure packages,” elected-Dartmouth trustee Stephen Smith said at AEI, “but by the time it gets to us it’s usually a done deal.”
“Some boards don’t even have a subcommittee on academic affairs.” Smith is also a law professor at UVA.
Faculty tend to occupy an exalted status on college campuses. “I hear that competition for faculty members is as intense as free agency,” Fain says.
“It depends on the institution and its bylaws,” Law Professor Nancy Rapoport says of trustees power over tenure. Rapoport teaches at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
A former clerk to U. S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Smith’s election to the Board at Dartmouth was not without controversy on the Hanover campus. “They said that we were part of a right-wing conspiracy,” Smith says of the candidates elected by alumni. “I was kind of disappointed.”
“If I’m part of a conspiracy, how come I don’t have a code name?” Smith asked sardonically. “And shouldn’t we have a secret handshake?”
For her part, Rapoport, co-editor of Enron: Corporate Finances and Their Implications, has made a careful study of governing boards of trustees and other luminaries. She sees the problems they encounter as coming in threes:
1. Cognitive Dissonance. The dictionary defines this as “psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.” Rapoport calls it “When smart people do dumb things.” A psychology web site noted that it is marked by “the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information and interpretation.”
2. Diffusion of authority.
3. Peer pressure.
One attendee, Robert Kreiser of the American Association of University Professors, complained about BB & T bankrolling a college course on Ayn Rand and fretted over academic autonomy. Rapoport gingerly told him that she resigned from the AAUP over the group’s financial exigencies report on Tulane.
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
